Is sustainable luxury an oxymoron? Depends on your definition.

The word luxury connotes excess; at the highest end, you’ve got super-yachts with heli-pads and champagne hot tubs, towing mini-yachts behind them like million dollar ducklings.  At the lower-but-still-pretty-high end, you can buy $100,000 watches and $600,000 bottles of Scotch at the airport when the spouse doesn’t need another Eiffel Tower snow globe.

It’s hard to argue that this kind of conspicuous consumption, except for possibly the Scotch, can be deemed sustainable or even useful.  

But luxury has another face.

In the waning decades of the last century, the upscale purse-mongers and sweater-slingers of the world recognized that they couldn’t rely on a handful of mercurial billionaires to keep them afloat. They started downgrading the product line, er, extending the brand, to appeal to people who were willing to spend more to buy stuff they would have gotten anyway, but with nicer fonts  (that this has often been a spectacularly successful strategy is remarkable and reflects poorly on humans, but that’s a separate discussion. ) Now instead of having to be humiliated and impoverished at their local equivalent of Rodeo Drive, any suburban aspirationista could take the minivan to the mall and pick up a 150 dollar Prada keychain  or 50 dollar Armani Exchange t-shirt.

Around the same time, newer companies like Coach and Starbucks emerged to offer this group of newly empowered consumers an affordable cachet, with products occupying price/quality points somewhere between their mass market competitors and traditional high end goods. (A 2004 Harvard Business Review article coined the cringey portmanteau “masstige ”  or mass prestige, to describe the phenomenon; the term never caught on and is repeated here principally for the amusement of the reader.)

This type of luxury product has the most promise in terms of achieving true sustainability. Excluding the hardest core of activists who define purchase of anything that would have been unfamiliar to a medieval peasant as environmental  crime, it’s fair to assume that people are going to need handbags, shoes, sweaters etc, and that those things can be manufactured and sold with some degree of sustainability.

The data suggest that it’s in the interests of companies to do just that.  A 2017 Nielsen survey in the United States found that while all age groups thought it was important that companies work to improve the environment, an overwhelming 83% of the millennial cohort (defined as born between 1982 and 1996) agreed with the statement.

And while that group may currently be cutting back on the avocado toast in the wake of the pandem-cession™, they and Gen Z after them are in line for the biggest wealth transfer in history as their boomer parents and grandparents shuffle off to communes and discos in the sky.   

Whether it’s altruism or self-interest, or most likely some combination, luxury goods companies are responding.

In 2019, a group of fashion houses and textile manufacturers, including big names like Adidas, Ralph Lauren,  and Hermes, signed on to the Fashion Pact, an agreement to work towards specific goals around climate change, biodiversity, and other environmental issues.   Not uncommonly for high-minded, well-publicized agreements, the details on how these goals will be achieved or measured are fuzzy, but it’s a step in the right direction.

More luxury goods companies are emerging with sustainability as a core value and not just a page on the website. NAK (No Animal Killed) shoes emerged in 2018 selling cruelty-free vegan footwear into the mass luxury market. Misadventure Vodka in San Diego (“Hedonistic Sustainability”) distills their premium product from expired baked goods. And in the automotive industry, Tesla has famously emerged as a luxury brand on a high profile mission to fight climate change.

It remains to be seen whether plant-based boots and electric limousines will save us from our self-inflicted existential crises.  As consumers grow more aware of the gravity of social and environmental challenges we face, will sustainability become effectively mandatory for companies selling into the luxury market? Or will we collectively shrug, buy more stuff, and document the collapse of civilization on Instagram?